


and that made all the difference

by fuhllmetal



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: "A Scholarly Fanfiction", Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Inspired by Poetry, M/M, Pining, Resolved Sexual Tension, Stream of Consciousness, Unreliable Narrator, a love letter via robert frost, attempts at major rhetorical devices, implied panic attack, set anywhere during the series but before the s2 finale, sort of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-29
Updated: 2017-01-29
Packaged: 2018-09-20 15:18:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,733
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9498005
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fuhllmetal/pseuds/fuhllmetal
Summary: Shiro meditates on choices made, results logical, and expectations dashed, but leaves out the hindsight bias.





	

_I shall be telling this with a sigh_

_Somewhere ages and ages hence:_

_Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—_

_I took the one less traveled by,_

_And that has made all the difference._

 

* * *

The stars slide past the Castle at a leisurely pace. Shiro watches them go, eyes drooping and hooded by his eyelids, and his mouth feeling uncomfortably slack against the stiffness of his jaw. He is alone in the forward observatory. It seems that the rest of the team figured out that as a creature of habit, he develops routines that he follows depending on his mood, and that when he's in the observatory, it's best to steer clear.

 

Sometimes he wishes they hadn’t come to that conclusion, but life was turning up nothing but shitty conclusions lately.

 

And what a forgone conclusion he was, wasn’t he? Sitting here alone, watching the stars just the same as he did as a child, except the scenery was completely different and the certainty that he’d get to feel their touch was less sickening than it felt right now. His stomach churned in agreement.

The stars were once an enticing hand upon his cheek, encouraging him toward them with the most seductive of smiles, and leaving him completely open to suggestion and, ultimately, unable to resist. Was that his downfall? His giving into temptation? Too cheesy.

No, he had a choice in the matter, of course. Why else would he be sitting in a ten thousand year old castle-ship, zipping around the galaxy to defeat the Cartoon Villain to End All Cartoon Villains with a team of almost contrived people that peppered his spotty past with their presences? Not to mention the robotic lions.

 

He told his mom that he wanted a pet lion when he was seven.

 

His choice. This was his choice. Who else would he have chosen to take up the roles of the most important characters in this story? Allura and Coran, idyllic throwbacks to a futuristic utopian society that he once wrote a story about as a young teenager. Lance and Hunk, the two cadets he gave a tour of the academy after they’d been accepted and were deciding whether or not to commit to the Galaxy Garrison. Pidge, the daughter of his two crewmates on the mission to Kerberos that was _certainly his choice, of course, including the outcome, yes, yes, a thousand times yes -_ he digresses. Pidge. Yes. Pidge.

 

And Keith.

 

Anyway, he made the choice to be here. The stars were speeding up, or maybe his brain was just slowing down. He felt the grip of his retinas on the image before him start to slip and his mind started on a slow tilt to the right, each star making a perfect arc downwards to follow him, ever accelerating. The blackness started overtaking his vision, spotting out the edges and encroaching on the middle like the mold eroding his memories; he was ready to give in -

 

A hand on his back. Vision returns. The stars return to their normal positions as if nothing ever happened. Shiro slowly turns to face the source of the touch and finds - of course.

“Shiro,” Keith murmurs, worry etched deep into his face. He’d get wrinkles by the time he was thirty at that rate.

 

“You nearly pass out and you still can manage the gallows humor. You’re insufferable,” he grumbles. Oh, Shiro said that out loud, didn’t he? Didn’t notice.

“Sorry,” Shiro says, voice coming out much reedier than he was expecting. Keith’s brow furrows again at the mere sound; Shiro feels his insides repeatedly hit the emergency eject button.

 

Silence creeps up on them from behind and overtakes them. Shiro succumbs to the full nelson without a second thought, but Keith looks like he’s trying to transfer Silence’s arms into at least a half. His face is twisted up in agony, and crudely Shiro thinks that he must really have to take a shit, but he doesn’t say it out loud this time.

“What were you thinking about, just now?” Keith flips the pin and ends the match. Shiro slowly lets their eyes meet, his expression flat.

“Before I panicked and nearly passed out, or during?”

Keith gives him a look. Shiro decides to go with the former.

 

“Two roads diverged in a wood and I, I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.”

“Frost?”

Shiro snorts. How strange that Keith would remember that of all things, though arguably it was even more contrived that he remembered that, himself, when he could hardly even recall his mother’s name.

 

“Yeah. I always liked that poem, when I was a kid - as much as a kid could like poetry, anyway. Choosing your own destiny and all that. Seemed all rosy and starry and perfect for a ‘golden boy’ like me.” Shiro shakes his head. “Too bad Frost was a really snarky bastard.”

“I don’t follow,” Keith frowns, scooting a little closer to Shiro on the bench.

“They always teach you in school that it’s all about how much your choices matter, right? Free will? Being a nonconformist? It’s a blindly optimistic reading, because when you take into account that Frost wrote that last line to purposefully punk those kinds of people, the whole thing bitters in your mouth real quick.” Shiro bites out the last word and let his shoulders hunch over farther past his ears. Keith stills next to him.

 

“So this is fate. That’s what you’re saying.” Trust Keith to get to the heart of the matter and take a quick and dirty stab at it while he had the chance. Shiro invites Silence back into the ring, but his plan is foiled when Keith comes up with the chair and gets ready for the Royal Smackdown.

“Shiro, I trust your judgment more than anyone on this ship - hell, this universe - but you’re being really fucking stupid right now.”

 

“Huh?” Is the elegant response Shiro crafts. He thought Keith was going to get him through the front, but he got him on the backswing, and here he was, his mood bleeding out on the pavement between him. The chair was raised, the impact was made, and it clatters to the floor. The stars come back into focus again.

“You heard me. You’re being really. Fucking. Stupid.”

“…what?”

“Don’t make me say it again.”

 

Shiro stops himself before he laughs at the sheer… _sheer_ of this conversation, and he raises his head from the sticky, bloody ground to pull himself together again. Okay. Apparently, he was being really fucking stupid, and it might be explained to him in a moment.

“I can’t really argue with you on the nature of free will right now, considering neither of us have died recently to maybe get the answer to that one, but I do have enough sense to tell you when you’re not having any,” Keith says.

“Well, enlighten me,” Shiro replies, bristling.

And just like that, Keith shrinks back, ever so slightly.

 

“It’s…you just dont, okay? I don’t want to like, beat up on you, but uh…”

Shiro cracks a smile. And there was the ultimate Keith move. Receptively listening to the opening statement, counterargument with bravado-filled punk, and the finisher…meek schoolboy caught with his hand in the cookie jar and grasping at the cookies like they were excuses ripe for the taking but, predictably, coming up with nothing. The intangible doesn’t transfer to the tangible, and the opposite doesn’t either.

“Don’t look at me like that.”

“Like what?”

“That. You know what I mean.”

 

They could read each other pretty well.

 

Keith turns away and looks out at the stars, lacing his fingers and pulsating them against each other in a steady rhythm as Shiro watches. Silence is allowed back into the room under the condition that it doesn’t try to pull any more illegal moves again. When Keith finally speaks, his voice is softer than before, but confidence peeks out through the gaps between his phrases.

 

“ _Something there is that doesn't love a wall,_

_That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,_

_And spills the upper boulders in the sun;_

_And makes gaps even two can pass abreast._ ”

 

Shiro stills, and then he laughs softly.

“Frost returned. What does this one mean?”

“What do you think?” Keith turns to look Shiro in the eye, gaze all fire and provocation. Shiro takes the bait without hesitation.

 

“You’re trying to get me to stop being so distant because it’s unnatural, just like human-built walls being eroded by nature are made from unnatural to taken over by nature.”

“Almost.”

Shiro pauses. Almost? It was a pretty clear use of language, clear enough that even Allura or Coran with no knowledge of Modern American poetry could deduce the meaning with ease.

“Fourth line. You’re not wrong, but you missed the fourth line. It’s important.”

 

Two can pass. Keith’s close proximity, the breadth of space between them diminishing further until it no longer exists, the ginger placement of Keith’s hand on Shiro’s right knee. Two can pass. _Two can pass_.

Two can pass, and Keith’s lips press softly against Shiro’s. The stars freeze for a moment and Shiro’s eyes widen in surprise and realization, but the flash-freeze sublimates just as fast and Shiro presses back. They shift towards each other and converge, over and over again, until Keith stops for breath and Shiro follows suit, his lips numb and consciousness aflame.

Shiro finds his hand in Keith’s hair and gently begins to disentangle it, but Keith tilts his head against his shoulder, trapping his hand there. Shiro lets it lay.

He glances down to Keith’s lips, slightly bruised from the gradually increased force of their kiss, but the moment doesn’t feel right anymore. Maybe that was a forgone conclusion, too. It doesn’t matter, though, because Keith’s right arm is still around Shiro, and his hand slowly runs in circles across his back.

 

“Well, I guess I can seduce you with poetry pretty effectively,” Keith murmurs into Shiro’s chest. “When the other option is you sulking out here alone, I mean.”

“You made the choice for me, Keith. Just you.”

* * *

 

_Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,_

_And sorry I could not travel both_

_And be one traveler, long I stood_

_And looked down one as far as I could_

_To where it bent in the undergrowth;_

**Author's Note:**

> "what the hell did you just do" - me before i started taking junior year english this year when i begrudgingly started enjoying poetry a lot to me after i wrote this, finishing at 2:22 am and not bothering to edit it either
> 
> a lot has happened In General in the past 5 or so months (world-wise, a lot of course, but also pretty much anything you could name personal-life-wise, too) so i poured all of that and just a dash of whatever i had left over after taking my english midterm and put it in this. it was very cathartic lmao
> 
> anyway, hope you enjoyed this nonsense and hopefully i'll wrote more in the future


End file.
